Four months in jail and 2 years of probation for his 2nd DUI in a 15 month span is considered not ****ing around? And he gets to leave jail to go work. Doesn't seem all that harsh to me.

It's relative. When I worked there, Arizona had a mandatory day in jail and a license suspension for the first DUI and increasing mandatory jail time, to the point where Maricopa County had to build a fairly large jail complex in tents in the desert. Plea bargaining was forbidden, which angered attorneys. I'm not sure anymore where it becomes a felony with mandatory prison time. When I moved to Wisconsin, I saw people getting license suspensions and community service sentences with their eighth convictions. Maybe they had good lawyers, though.

Of course, in Arizona, DUI is a criminal offense, either misdemeanor or felony, as opposed to a traffic violation, so a conviction affects more than points against your license.

It was surprising as Arizona increaesd their DUI penalties to see that there were still large numbers of people driving drunk. You would think the penalties would be a deterent. There were some in the Legislature that argued the increased penalties were creating a financial hardship on state and county governments. But the mandatory fines are big too.